In May 2021, we had our first video interview with professional environment artist, Adrien Paguet-Brunella. Since then, we’ve dealt with a few technical issues, online tradeshows, an acquisition by Unity Technologies, and releasing version 9, but we finally found time to finish editing this together.
Think of this as a pilot for conversations with industry professionals about what they do and their work on specific projects. If you enjoy Talkin’ Trees and want to hear from other pros in the field of games or cinema production, let us know in the YouTube comments.
Adrien is currently a senior environment artist at Haven Studios. In this interview, he discusses his his first end-to-end AAA game, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Artstation Instagram TwitterKey takeaways from our conversation with Adrien
- SpeedTree 6 was used to create the vegetation of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
- The 3 artistic pillars guiding vegetation design were, grandiose, varied, and otherworldly.
- Adrien’s motto for this project was “every shape matters,” alluding to the team’s development process of scrutinizing silhouettes before moving on to the leaves and texture details.
- Feedback is critical for your work. Try to fight your ego and be ready to share at any stage of production.
- Game studios look for artists with a mindset for games. LODs and collision are important to keep in mind.
- Decimation of polygon counts between LODs were as follows: LOD1 has 2/3 of the budget of LOD0; 50% of LOD1 for LOD2; 50% of LOD2 for LOD3; and flat plane “fakes” for LOD4.
- Photogrammetry is used to add details to meshes but it’s more of a tool and not a complete pipeline on this project.
- The environment art industry is a small world. Reach out to professionals, and create opportunities to collaborate with your peers. Environment art, especially at the AAA scale, is a team effort.
- Never stop learning. Technologies and pipelines are constantly evolving, and getting comfortable in a pipeline could hold you back.
- Don’t just use tools that are trending. Try new plugins and software, experiment. For example, know how to build textures from scratch, not just in one program.
Assassin’s Creed team mentioned
Every AAA game is a team effort. Here are the names that came up during our interview.
Damien Audy Laplante
Level Artist
Raphael Lacoste
Senior Art Director & Illustrator
Joel Pelletant
Vegetation & Environment Artist
Alexandre Robert
Level Artist
Alfredo Cristinziano
Texture Team Lead
Pierre-Alexandre Côté
Texture Artist
Miakim Lavallée
Level & Environment Artist
Pierre-Alexandre Pascale
Technical Artist
Gilles Beloeil
Concept Artist
Donglu Yu
Concept Artist
Virginie Cinq-Mars
Lighting Artist
Philippe Ringuette-Angrignon
Technical Director – Graphics
Sébastien Primeau
Assistant Art Director – Graphics
Vladimir Eskandari
Assistant Art Director – Graphics
Sources of inspiration
Giving shoutouts to the content that inspired Adrien (and us).
Between tech and art: The vegetation of Horizon Zero Dawn
A 2018 talk led by Guerilla Games’s Gilbert Sanders on the tech behind the lush vegetation of Horizon Zero Dawn.
Alexis Boyer
Mentioned briefly in reference to her work, Alexis Boyer is behind the vegetation of both the Demon Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes.
The Heather Society
The source of the heather colors Adrien mentioned was formed in 1963 and closed in 2020. The Heather Society lives on as the website, “Heather World,” providing a wealth of information for environment artists and plant enthusiasts alike.
Adrien and Vladimir’s talk for GDC 2021
The 2021 GDC Summit talk, “The Natural World of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla” is still in the GDC vault. We’ll share a link or provide the video here if it becomes publicly available in the future.